At the start of my next play though I have encountered a village of machines, the sworn enemy of mankind and the androids, that was full of friendly machines that all had different personalities and spoke to the androids in different ways. The game does give you the ability to kill them if you choose (although I never tried to besides by accidentally shooting my turret) or let them live. I found this extremely intriguing. On the one hand its the androids mission to destroy all machines and the aliens that created them and cleanse the earth for the return of the humans. But on the other they are sentient and have no will to fight with the androids. I for one loved this mechanic. There is also another section full of passive machines celebrating at an old amusement park. None of them attack you at any point but a large tank with several machines comes rolling into the square at one point. Launching fireworks and confetti out the barrel. Your companion 9S says something along the lines of "They have a lot of weaponry here, we should kill them now or we will regret it later." But seeing as they were essentially harmless at that moment in time I left them be. My mindset at that time was "They aren't doing anything right now. Ill be able to deal with it later if needs be." but they weren't a problem for the rest of that map section. While before I would kill every machine that came in my way after seeing that there are many in the world that are sentient in some way I have just resorted to killing the ones that are aggressive and initiate combat first. I am excited to see the choices that are presented to me in the future and what will happen in the end. The mystery of the machines continues!

Comments

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Great job! It sounds like a lot of your playthrough so far has been about the changing perceptions/understanding about who your enemy is. At first the machines were presented as a faceless, generic enemy, and now you’ve seen them with sentience and personality and have resultantly developed a moral system to determine when to kill or not kill them. Would you have played the game differently from the beginning, knowing what you know now? How does this gradual humanization affect your perceptions of the ongoing conflict? Are there parallels you could draw to our current world? You don’t have to address any of these questions in your OPA, they’re just things you can use to brainstorm ideas if you get really stuck.